Jerry Friedman

The New York financial firm involved in the unsuccessful 1998 effort to buy Lido Marina Village--a plan believed to have contributed to the resignation of former Newport Beach City Manager Kevin Murphy--now is reportedly close to buying the 4-acre shopping center again. Lehman Brothers Holdings has bought portions of the property and is under contract to purchase the remainder, said Tony Wattson, president of Wattson Breevast, a local developer working on the deal with the New York firm.

The Lido Marina Village shopping and restaurant complex on Balboa Peninsula is for sale. The package includes a parking structure and 85 boat slips. Businesses there include restaurants, art galleries, marine charter offices, clothing shops and the Thunderbird night club. Marvin Engineering Co., a 500-employee defense component manufacturer in Inglewood, bought the property in May, 1993.

A four-way race for Honorary Mayor of Sunland-Tujunga starts Saturday, with the real winner being the local chamber of commerce and four community organizations. "It should be fun and in good sportsmanship," said current Honorary Mayor Charlyne Pleasant, president of the Sunland-Tujunga Chamber of Commerce, describing the ground rules for the campaign ending June 30.

Attorneys for two members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team filed suit in federal court Monday, seeking damages and explanations from the team and its owners, Metromedia Inc. A teary-eyed Hubert E. (Geese) Ausbie, who said in May he had resigned after 24 years with the Globetrotters, said at a news conference that he was fired. His portion of the suit seeks $595,500 in additional severance pay, damages for breach of contract and unpaid endorsement money. Frederic D.

Two men described by police as "the meanest crooks alive" were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of snatching donation buckets for the Muscular Dystrophy Assn. from the checkout counters of two Burbank convenience stores, police said. George Moore, 24, of Los Angeles and Daniel Dellaporta, 26, of Burbank were jailed on suspicion of burglary for grabbing the cash-filled buckets and dashing out of two 7-Eleven stores early Wednesday, Sgt. Don Goldberg said.

Penny Edwards, a teenage Broadway dancer who moved to Hollywood to make 68 motion pictures ranging from Westerns to comedies and appeared in more than 500 television episodes, has died. She was 70. Edwards died Aug. 26 of lung cancer in Friendswood, Texas, said her daughter Deborah Winters.

A week after the Los Angeles City Council rejected plans to build a golf course in the Big Tujunga Wash, the developer Thursday filed a $215-million claim against the city, charging that the project was illegally rejected. The claim, which sets the stage for a lawsuit, accuses the council of opposing the project due to pressure from an influential labor union instead of basing its decision on the merits of the project.

An animal-rights group has turned to a well-known figure to promote vegetarianism: Jesus Christ. About three dozen demonstrators from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals tried to deliver that message to Christians on Sunday outside the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. They carried signs proclaiming "Jesus was a Vegetarian" while a man dressed and groomed like popular depictions of Jesus waved at churchgoers stuck in traffic.

'Come in, it's warm inside," beckoned an ad for the Orthodox Jewish school Shalhevet, and that's just what Alexander Maksik did. It was a shock at first. There he was, a young sometime actor, a secular Jew uninterested in religion, newly installed as a middle school English teacher. In the hallways, girls and women walked by in long skirts, boys and men with yarmulkes on their heads. At 7:30 each morning, students gathered to daven.

A prominent official of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles was shot and killed by a gunman at an automatic teller machine in West Los Angeles early Tuesday morning, police said. Jerry Weber, 49, had just completed a transaction at the drive-up teller when two men approached and ordered him in "loud and profane language to get out of the car," said Lt. Ross Moen, commanding officer of the LAPD's Pacific Division detective unit.